In many ways, having a husband recuperating from a major surgery is just like having a newborn. (Except, you know: no sweet, delicious, tiny newborn.) In the beginning, when you first get home from the hospital, people are kind and bring you home-cooked meals. There is an entirely new schedule to keep track of—meds instead of breastfeeding, but it’s almost as time-consuming. You worry about germs. You feel grateful everything went smoothly and (truth be told) occasionally get a little bit stressfully obsessive about how it could’ve gone wrong. You don’t do much except stay at home.

You never, ever sleep through the night.

Which is likely why I’ve not posted the details of Kendell’s surgery so far. Three weeks later, he is slowly recuperating. This time has definitely been harder than the first time. But, he’s doing a little bit better every day. He’s going on walks and starting to exercise just a little bit (can’t do much until the sternum heals fully); he has officially entered the I’m-so-bored-I’m-grumpy stage of getting better (wheeeeeee!).

He’s coming along.

The cool thing about getting bumped from a Friday surgery and having to come in on a Saturday instead—a Saturday that’s also a holiday—is that you’re the only one in the pre-op rooms. The doctors, nurses, anesthesiologist, and surgeon all spent much more personal time with us than I think they would have if there were other surgeries. I joked with them: if you come in to do a surgery on Halloween, do you operate with a skeleton crew? They laughed but were quick to reassure me that they weren’t cutting any corners. Kendell would get just as good of work on a Saturday Halloween as he would any other day of the week.

I think they told the truth. I’m honestly a little bit in love with all of the surgical team. They kept me informed and made sure I was OK. Kendell’s surgeons warned us that surgeries like this—replacing a previously-replaced aortic valve—can take longer than the first time, up to twelve hours. Kendell’s took about six. When I first went into the waiting room (after leaving the hospital to get myself some breakfast) it was entirely empty. Once it got a little bit later, four people came in. They were siblings or maybe in-laws, and oh my goodness, they made me nuts. They were all trying to talk over each other in that self-important way that some people have. I kept thinking about how miserable their Christmases must be. I started thinking of them as the bossy family and tried to just tune them out, by reading my book (The House at Riverton) and writing in my journal.

Once the surgery was finished, the surgeon came out to tell me how it went. When he got into Kendell’s heart, he discovered that two of the three valves were covered with some sort of growth. He said he’s never seen anything like it—after doing this surgery for nearly thirty years. He has no idea what it is, and sent the old valve off to pathology so they could figure it out. (We haven’t seen the surgeon again yet, and I am dying to know the results. It’s just so strange.) The growth was so heavy, it made the valves too weighed down to open, so only one cuspid was letting blood through. The growth also made the valve difficult to remove, because it was so stiff and they didn’t want to dislodge anything while they worked. But Kendell’s body handled the procedure well and he didn’t have any complications.

After the surgeon left, I still had to wait another two hours or so until I could see Kendell. (This is because they don’t let anyone into the ICU until the patient has been extubated.) During that time, some of the bossy family had left, and other siblings had come in. They would take turns rotating in and out of the ICU to see their father. Eventually the bossy mom also showed up, and some grandkids who were too young to see their grandpa. One of them was about ten years old, and the grandma was explaining what had happened to him. “Remember how Grandpa had that problem with the big vein in his heart? And he didn’t want to have a surgery? Well, yesterday it broke, and so the doctors had to go in and fix it.”

I know: totally rude of me to eavesdrop. (But, hard to not hear when they were all just so loud.) I was putzing on my phone and half-listening to their conversation when it clicked. I contorted myself so the grandma could see me, and I said “I’m sorry, this is totally none of my business, but I’m just wondering—was your husband the man who had an emergency surgery yesterday? To repair his burst aorta?” She said “yes, how’d you know?” and then I explained that Kendell had been bumped because of his surgery. (I wasn’t rude about it. At least, I hope I wasn’t rude about it.)

Apparently, this man had known about the bulge on his aorta for more than two years, but refused to have the surgery to repair it. Just Kendell’s luck that it would burst on the day of his surgery! (That sounds flippant, but if you knew Kendell’s bad luck you’d know what I mean. If anything is going to go wrong, it goes wrong for him.) The crazy thing is that something like two-thirds of people who have burst aortas don’t make it, but it was looking like he would be OK. She apologized profusely and thanked me very sincerely for letting her husband have our surgeon. “You made 38 grandchildren very grateful,” she said.

We didn’t talk very long—Kendell’s nurse came to get me just ten minutes or so after we started talking. But it totally changed my response to the rest of the day. (This was true, actually, for his entire stay in the ICU, because the burst-aorta grandpa was next door to him, and I talked to several of his adult kids, and even though they continued to be bossy and self-important and loud, they were also kind and made sure to ask about Kendell as well as give me updates on their dad.) It made me think about the fragile nature of the heart—even though it is such a strong muscle, so many things can go wrong. Not just the heart, though. Existence itself. So many things can go wrong. And I just don’t know. In seven years, Kendell has had four major surgeries. Each time, he’s been able to rebound and then go about his life. Aside from scars, he is mostly physically normal, a walking billboard for modern medicine.

We have been blessed in so many ways. From finding the exact right surgeons for his conditions to the oddest and most life-saving timing. Blessed to avoid complications or infections. Blessed to be able to move forward with him healed.

But I keep thinking about that growth, and the one flap that was entirely normal. When they removed his original aortic valve six years ago, they were surprised to find it was a unicuspid valve. All his life, he lived with one cuspid opening and shutting to let blood leave his heart. One cuspid. And then, when we repair it, what did his heart do? It worked splendidly for a while, but eventually returned to a single working cuspid. It’s just so strange to me. Why would a growth develop on just two cuspids? Why not all three? I know that no doctor would ever tell me this, and that it is probably some medical version of magical thinking. But it is as if his body wanted stasis. Wanted to return to what it was used to for so long, and it did what it had to do. A clumsy, potentially life-threatening return to a sort of balance.

It’s just…odd.

Maybe after we see the surgeon again and find out the pathology reports, I will feel differently. Maybe this unease will fade as Kendell continues to heal. But I think it won’t entirely go away—this little nagging worry. I want what he wants, for him to go many, many years without any health issues. I want his scars to fade and not need to be reopened. I want him to not need a fifth surgery, or an eighth. I want his body to cooperate and work properly.

I want him to one day been a grandpa. We likely won’t ever have 38 grandchildren, but I hope we’ll have some, and I hope they will love him and be grateful he’s here. I hope his heart keeps beating and that his new valve will settle into his heart without any other issues.

I hope he can find a new stasis.

(FYI: this is a long and Mormony post about very Mormony things, so feel free to skip it if you're not interested in that sort of thing.)

Imagine my mother:

A small, blonde girl with ringlets in a white dress, pale pink pinafore, bobby socks and patent-leather shoes. She’s walking down a tree-lined sidewalk on a Sunday morning in spring, one of those days when color has finally come back in the world and everything feel full of hope.

Her blonde curls bounce as she walks, and sometimes a skip makes its way into her stride.

Where is she going? To church.

Why is she alone? Because her parents—my grandparents Florence and Fuzz, who I love dearly and miss desperately, the two people in my life who taught me the most about unconditional love—didn’t believe in the church.

(Actually, I don’t know: did they not believe? or did they just not go for some reason?)

Her parents didn’t take her to church. Her brother didn’t join her. She just went—by herself.

This is one of my favorite imaginings of my mother, headed off to church by herself. I don’t know why she went (we don’t often talk about church), if she had friends there, if other families took her into their pews or she sat by herself. But it teaches me something, this image of my mother, about being faithful, about finding your own way.

She kept going to church. She grew up, went to BYU, got married in the temple. Then, two daughters and three years of miserable marriage later, she got divorced.

And she stopped.

Stopped going to the church. Stopped going to the temple. Stopped living an LDS life.

She met my dad and married him. He adopted her daughters and they had two more together. Sometimes we went to church, but usually not.

I don’t know what happened in her first marriage to make her turn away from the church—it is another thing we don’t talk about. But later, when her dad died and the steel mill closed, she went back to the church. She started wearing garments again, started praying, started going to Sunday meetings.

My dad was a different story.

He, too, grew up with parents who didn’t go to church. But his mom, unlike my maternal grandma, was vociferously agnostic. She taught him to question—the kind of questions shaped to poke holes rather than build knowledge. She taught him doubt and disdain. He was baptized, although I don’t know why: they never went to church; they didn’t believe.

Not going to church, he grew up. He lost his dad when he was far too young—only sixteen. He stopped playing football, he gave up his baseball dreams, he partied and ran wild and started working at the steel mill. Then he met my mom. He adopted my sisters. He gave up smoking after I was born. He taught me to love reading, being outside, and flowers. He was kind and gentle, an animated (if rambling) storyteller unafraid to tell a dirty joke. He blessed us when we were born and he baptized us, but he mostly ignored the church until he was in his sixties, when he decided to read the Book of Mormon and then to go to the temple.

He was ill with Alzheimer’s not three years later, and he never fully explained to me his change of heart. I don’t know why, exactly, he reached out to Christ, except for his worsening depression. But during those last years before he got sick, he lived the gospel.

These are the faiths of my parents.

And I could no more disavow them—all their imperfections and inconsistencies, all their leaving and staying and changing, their questions and their calm indifference—than I could disavow my own faith. My imperfect, shaky faith.

In our little Utah town, I grew up ostracized—baptized a member of the church, but not really Mormon. When my mom decided to go back to church, I went too, but only for a little while. When I sat in Young Women classes with girls who had never really been my friend and treated me like I wasn’t good enough, I felt a dissonance I didn’t have any words for, and I poured every bit of it into my adolescent rebellion. I challenged everything, sharp questions meant to poke holes. I was full of disdain for the church.

And then, when I was seventeen and at my darkest, I turned toward the church for light. I went back to church, as the saying goes, even though for me it wasn’t exactly a return. I’ve been a member my entire life, but I feel more like a convert. Like my mother, I found a reason to return. Like my dad, I have never stopped questioning. Perhaps not poking holes, but my faith isn’t the kind that automatically accepts everything. Instead, I question. I have to learn for myself why a thing is true or not true. My faith is restless and wandering, a doubting and troubled sort of thing.

It doesn’t always bring me peace, but I am accustomed to that. I have learned that I will likely never have a usual Mormon response to most things, will never intrinsically think like my lifetime-member friends do.

I have learned that this is a strength I bring to the church. My knowledge of truths does not come from blind obedience, but from using the truths. Trying them out, pondering them, seeing how they work in my life. Or don’t work. What I believe I believe because of my own tests and trials, not because someone told me I should believe it. I think this is a strength because it lets people see that having questions and pursuing answers doesn’t lead to rejection of the church but a deep and living knowledge.

But here I am, trying to understand a policy I don’t want to understand. Because I don’t want to think the way that someone would have to think in order to agree with this policy. It’s twofold:

1. Gay people who are married are considered to be apostate by the church. (“Apostate” meaning, basically, that you knew the truth but rejected it.)
2. Children of gay people who are married are not allowed to be blessed as babies nor baptized until they are 18 and willing to denounce their gay parent’s lifestyle.

The first part deserves its own blog post, but it is the second part that has me (and so many, many members) troubled. I don’t know what breaks my heart more:  children being denied blessing and baptism, or adult children being forced to renounce their parents. This doesn’t feel like my church. It feels like putting the sins of the father (or the mother) onto the child, which goes against every basic tenant of the church I know. It feels like punishing children. It feels like a statement: only the perfect are wanted here.

I know what someone else might say: that my response is too extreme. It’s not all imperfect families not welcome in the church. It’s just the gay ones. By saying that people in gay marriages are apostate, the church is saying, in effect, that they are unforgiveable. And their children barely redeemable. Which is untenable to me. How is having a gay father more wrong than having, say, a father who abuses his wife? Or cheats? Or drinks himself silly far too often? Or what about a heterosexual mother who is herself apostate, actively involved in teaching her kids to hate the church? Why would any children be denied entrance into the church because of what their parents do?

If my entrance to the church was based on my parents’ faith, would I be admitted? Because their faith was imperfect. Their parents’ faith was also flawed, if it even existed. What about my own children—if we are basing their acceptance within the church on my faith, they, too, might not be acceptable. Where will we draw the line at who is good enough? If it is only the children of gay people, that says one thing about the church. If gayness is just a beginning, and soon others also won’t be good enough, that is another.

But neither is good.

I don’t understand. I don’t know how to fit this into my faith. Strike that: I don’t want to fit it into my faith. I don’t want to think that only the perfect are wanted at church. And I don’t want to devalue my own parents’ imperfect contribution to and shaping of my faith. If I had to disavow them because of their mistakes, I don’t think I could, because, yes, their good choices influenced me, but their mistakes did more. How they dealt with their questions and struggles was a living example to me that in the church are experiences and truths that are worth the rest of it, the judgement and small-mindedness and the refusal to see that there isn’t always one right answer. The combination of their faiths taught me that faith is an imperfect thing that weakens or grows strong at different times and with different experiences, but is always also a choice.

And always before me is that image of my mother, walking to church all by her small, brave self.  She was imperfect, too. She came from “faulty” parents who smoked and drank and cheated and had coffee every single morning, tea with lunch, gin with dinner. What if she hadn’t been made to feel welcome? What if someone’s idea of her parents had made her feel less than, and she had stopped being brave and going to church on her own?

Without her imperfect faith, I wouldn’t have my own faith.

This wouldn’t matter to me at all if I didn’t love the gospel. The church is one of the frames I have built my adult life on, and I did that consciously. Not because it’s what you do where I live, but because I actively chose, and I chose because of the good in it. It brings me good things (as well as frustration) and it brings my family good things. This is not the first policy I have grappled with, it will likely not be the last one I cannot make peace with. It is, though, a thing I will have to love the gospel around. Despite of.

I thought writing this might bring me some sort of resolution, but it didn’t. Last night, late, I stood in front of the picture of Christ I have in my living room. Just looking at it and thinking, and a thought came to me: what would Christ want me to do? Does He want me choose obedience? Or does He want me to choose His example of loving others? That is a pair of spiraling questions, a gyre leading nowhere. Obedience should bring me to a place that allows me to love others.

And I don’t know what to do with this policy that makes it otherwise.